Nissan is recalling 46 model year 2002 Nissan Pathfinder and Infiniti QX4 vehicles manufactured from August 24, 2001 through August 28, 2001. The air bag inflator contains propellant wafers that are required to properly deploy the front passenger air bag. Due to improper propellant wafer installation during the air bag inflator assembly process, some air bag inflators may be missing one of the wafers. As a result, the remaining wafers in the inflator used for the deployment of the front passenger air bag may, over time, break up into powder due to normal vibration experienced while driving. This causes the combustion rate of the propellant to increase inside the inflator, which can lead to internal pressure rising suddenly during air bag deployment. The inflator housing may rupture, causing an irregular deployment and some possibility of producing loose metal fragments, increasing a risk of injury to the front passenger. 10V-312.

Apparently, the quality control programs in place at the air bag supplier were not good enough to catch these defects during the air bag inflator manufacturing process.

Many consumers have contacted us and asked whether there was a way to report their airbag problem or defect to the government.  The good news is that there is a way to do that, and it’s relatively easy.  The federal agency that tracks these complaints is the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), specifically their Office of Defects Investigation (ODI).  Click here to go to the specific web page that allows you to file your complaint.

You can file your complaint using different methods, including over the phone, by mail, or over the internet.  Any method will work, but I always recommend submitting it over the internet.  This way, you don’t have to worry about some worker understanding what you are saying over the phone and then summarizing it in a way you did not intend.  Plus, when you submit it over the internet, it gets posted promptly, and you can verify it by checking the complaint file for your vehicle model.  NHTSA removes the personal identifying information to protect your privacy.

Although there is no guarantee that NHTSA will respond to your complaint, they do monitor them.  The more people that complain about a particular issue, the more likely it is to get their attention because that indicates the problem may be widespread rather than an isolated incident.  Do yourself and others a favor: if you have a complaint, file it.  You never know, you may be one of those whose complaint helped forced a car company to conduct a safety recall.  Of course, if an airbag problem caused you or a loved one to suffer serious injuries, please feel free to contact us for a free consultation.

Yes. In general, the air bag laws require a car company to design its air bags for all reasonably foreseeable users of their vehicles. Since people come in all shapes and sizes, and since the car companies know this, they must design their vehicles with this in mind. Not surprisingly, this was explicitly reinforced by an industry standard published by the Society of Automotive Engineers. And, in fact, the crash test dummies used for government crash testing for many decades are positioned using a procedure that is expressly based on the seating position of a large adult male.

Crash test dummies representing a 95th percentile adult male have been available for crash testing for more than 20 years. Injury criteria for this crash test dummy were developed by the industry decades ago. Unfortunately, our experience in air bag lawsuits has revealed that some car companies failed to conduct any crash testing with these crash test dummies. Some have claimed that they could not conduct such testing because the government did not incorporate the injury criteria into federal regulations at that time. This argument is completely unpersuasive.

First, the federal regulations are minimum standards, and do not represent the state-of-the-art. A manufacturer has always been free to exceed those standards, and could therefore have conducted such testing. Second, the injury criteria were published within the automotive industry, and the car companies could have utilized those published criteria to evaluate the risk of injury to large stature occupants. Third, if a particular car company disagreed with the published injury criteria, it could have developed its own standards. It is telling that those companies who claim that the injury criteria were not “validated” are the ones who never even tried to evaluate or validate them. Fourth, significant information about crash test dummy kinematics (the motion of the crash test dummy during a crash) could be obtained even if the injury measurements were not made.

In my opinion, the car companies who try to justify their failure to use these large size crash test dummies are merely engaging in a junk science post-hoc rationalization of their failure to comply with industry standards.

Those car companies who failed to conduct appropriate testing with a reasonably foreseeable range of occupant sizes were negligent and reckless. In my opinion, this failure to test was often the result of putting profits ahead of safety. It costs money to conduct this testing. A prototype of an all-new vehicle line can cost as much as $500,000, with the actual test cost adding to the total; this provides an incentive for car companies to skip such testing. If the testing reveals a problem (such as contact of the occupant’s forehead with the windshield header, or a risk of neck injury), it can cost many millions of dollars to fix the problem. Those companies who fail to conduct appropriate testing create an unfair advantage by saving millions of dollars compared to those who do the right thing and conduct all appropriate testing to ensure their air bag systems work appropriately.

If you believe a car company cut corners in designing your air bag system and caused you to be injured in an accident, please feel free to call us toll-free at 1-888-834-5297 for a n0-charge consultation with an air bag lawyer and former air bag engineer / expert witness.

Airbag inflators are the component within an airbag system that produces the gas that inflates an airbag. For frontal airbags, there were two major types of inflators. One type used solid chemicals that burned very rapidly (less than 1/20th of a second) to produce nitrogen gas. The most common chemical for these inflators was sodium azide, which had been used in the defense armaments industry. The other type used stored gas (often a mixture of helium and argon) that was heated to expand it and fill the bag.

When either type of inflator deploys, the gas that is produced always contains byproducts of the combustion process. These byproducts can include dangerous gases as benzene and toluene, as well as particulates that appear to be smoke. This is one reason why many people involved in an accident where the airbags deployed report seeing smoke in the passenger compartment. These byproducts can cause significant breathing difficulties, particularly in those people who already suffer from asthma or other respiratory problems.

Through most of the 1990s, the cars produced by the car companies used a “one size fits all” inflator in their airbag systems. That meant that once your airbag sensors sent the deployment signal, the airbag would deploy with the same force regardless of the accident circumstances. So, you got the same airbag force in an 8 mph fender-bender as a highway-speed head-on collision. It didn’t matter whether you were a short woman or a big and tall man – it was always the same. However, dual stage inflators were feasible during that time frame; they would adjust the force of the deployment based on the severity of the accident. Most people don’t realize that such dual stage airbags were being sold by General Motors in the mid-1970s at its Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac dealers.

Since the late 1990s, car companies have returned to dual stage inflator technology, and are now using multi-stage technology. These inflators adjust the force of the deployment depending on such things as crash severity, seat belt use, seat position and occupant size.  Many of these airbag systems use advanced computer systems to adjust the inflator force; unfortunately, as with many other computer-based systems, they sometimes fail with devastating results.  Sometimes the airbag inflator deploys at full power when it should not have deployed at all.  At other times, the airbag inflator does not deploy at all when it should have, depriving the person of the safety benefits of their airbag.

With the complexity of today’s airbag systems, you need an experienced airbag attorney, preferably with an airbag engineering background, to determine whether your airbag system worked as intended during your accident.

After an airbag deployment, some consumers report seeing one or two holes in their airbag. They then question whether their airbag deployed properly. The short answer is: it depends. This post will describe the various types of holes in airbag fabric, and some of their causes.

Some airbags are designed to have holes in them. These are called vent holes, because their purpose is to release or “vent” the gas that is inside the airbag. As the gas exits the vent holes, the airbag compresses, gradually slowing down your body during a crash. These vent holes are usually round, and can have a diameter of between about ¾ inch and 3 inches. The smaller vent holes are often used in driver airbags, with the larger vent holes used almost exclusively in passenger air bags. When you look at them, the circular shape should be fairly obvious. However, if the fabric around the edge of the vent is not reinforced, the pressure within the airbag during the crash can make the round hole more square in shape by slight tearing of the fabric. This can be normal, if they were designed to tear. In almost all cases, vent holes in a driver air bag should face to the front, away from you. Vent holes in a passenger air bag are generally on the sides of the airbag, and not in the portion of the fabric that you normally touch.

A few vehicles used “petal vents” which are semi-circular slits in a driver airbag. The intent is that these vents open up like a flap when the airbag is pressurized. Some believe that these vents are not nearly as efficient as traditional vent holes, and can be a sign of an inflator that over-pressurizes the airbag.

Holes in your airbag that are lengthy or irregular can be signs that your airbag tore during deployment. We have seen some instances where the fabric “catches” on a piece of the surrounding frame or cover. If this happens, your airbag did not perform as it should have, and you may not have been fully protected during your accident. In a few cases, large scale ripping of the airbag fabric (or its tethers) is caused by airbag inflators that are overly aggressive: their forcefulness simply rips the fabric apart during the deployment process. These are clearly defective.

In some other instances, you can have either a circular hole or an irregular hole in the fabric closest to the driver or passenger. These can be caused by defects in the airbag inflator that cause it to break apart. Loose pieces from such a defect can then be sent flying like shrapnel right through the bag. These same pieces can cause devastating injuries to a driver or passenger in their path.

A car company or supplier who produces defective airbags or airbag inflators should accept responsibility for their defect; if not, you should speak with an air bag lawyer knowledgeable about such issues.

Absolutely not! This is one of the most common misperceptions among consumers. In fact, most airbags vary widely in their design, materials and manufacturing. That means that some airbags protect you better than other airbags. It also means that some airbags are more dangerous than other airbags.

The differences among airbags extend to various characteristics. First, the inflators that generate the gas that fills the airbag can be of different types. Some used solid chemicals such as sodium azide to produce nitrogen gas. Others use stored gas; for example, some use a mixture of helium and argon. Some inflators deploy at the same force level, regardless of the accident severity. Others adjust the deployment forces based on the size and position of the passenger or based on the severity of the crash.

The fabric airbags themselves can also vary widely. Some are nylon, some are polyester. Some have vent holes, others don’t. Some are coated to control the amount of gas exhausted from the bag when the person pushes against it during a crash. Some reach so far toward the passenger that they can slam into their face at hundreds of miles per hour, even if the passenger has not yet moved in response to crash forces. Some are tethered to reduce this risk.

Airbag crash sensors can also vary widely by cars. In the early 1990s, most manufacturers used crash sensors mounted in the front of the car. By the mid 1990s, some of these manufacturers eliminated these front safety sensors, saving millions of dollars in the process. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, some of these manufacturers shifted back to systems that included front airbag crash sensors. Even so, our research and investigation has revealed that similar cars sold under different brand names fail to include such front crash sensors on some models, even though they are present in other models.

Sensing systems that fail to include front crush zone sensors can have many problems. They often have difficulty sensing real-world accidents quickly enough, which can result in late deployments that cause serious personal injuries or even a wrongful death from the airbag deployment. They can also fail to deploy the airbags in crashes involving a tree or utility pole. Some manufacturers made their remaining sensors too sensitive, in an attempt to create a cheap fix for these problems. This has resulted in numerous deployments where airbags were not intended to deploy, including rock impacts to an undercarriage and very minor crashes.

In short, there are significant differences among various airbag designs. There are also significant differences in the ways different car companies engineer their airbags, with some companies using shortcuts to reduce the amount of money they spend to engineer their airbags. Those airbags can be much more dangerous than other airbags.

There is no single “airbag law” that covers all laws, rules and regulations that apply to airbags. However, some people refer to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 208 (FMVSS 208) as the “airbag law” since it contains the primary regulations for occupant crash protection passed by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Although FMVSS 208 is about 80 pages long, its core is represented by injury criteria measured by a crash test dummy during testing.

However, a car can still be defective even if it complies with FMVSS 208, as it represents only a minimum standard; carmakers are free to exceed the requirements of FMVSS 208, and they should clearly do so.  State laws relating to negligence, strict liability (defective products), breach of warranty, and others impose a duty on the car companies to use reasonable care in designing and manufacturing their cars and avoiding defects in them.  As an airbag lawyer, I see many cases where the manufacturer claims to have complied with all applicable safety standards and yet there are airbag defects.  These problems range from unwarranted deployments and late deployments to airbag-induced injuries and failure to deploy.  Furthermore, millions of cars, trucks, vans, and SUVs have been recalled to fix airbag safety defects, even though each of those vehicles was originally claimed to have met its safety standards.

The injury criteria used in the federal standards have evolved in the past decade as frontal airbag systems have evolved, but are summarized below for the 50^th percentile male test dummy. There are also injury criteria for other size crash test dummies, including those representing a 5^th percentile (small-stature) female, 6 year old child, 3 year old child, and 12 month old child (using the CRABI Child Restraint Air Bag Interaction test dummy). Additional information can be found in Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations, section 571.208, as well as part 572.

INJURY CRITERIA FOR 50^th PERCENTILE MALE HYBRID III TEST DUMMY

Pre-depowered airbags (generally prior to 1998 model year):

1. All portions of the test dummy shall be contained within the outer surfaces of the vehicle passenger compartment
2. Head Injury Criterion (HIC) limit: 1000 (36 ms maximum)
3. Chest acceleration limit: 60 g’s
4. Chest compression (deflection) limit: 3 inches
5. Femur loading (force) limit: 2250 pounds

Depowered airbags (generally beginning with the 1998 model year):

1. All portions of the test dummy shall be contained within the outer surfaces of the vehicle passenger compartment
2. Head Injury Criterion (HIC) limit: 1000 (36 ms maximum)
3. Chest acceleration limit: 60 g’s
4. Chest compression (deflection) limit: 3 inches
5. Femur loading (force) limit: 2250 pounds
6. Neck flexion (forward bending) moment: 190 Nm
7. Neck extension (rearward bending) moment: 57 Nm

  Advanced airbags (phased in beginning generally with the 2004 model year):

1. All portions of the test dummy shall be contained within the outer surfaces of the vehicle passenger compartment
2. Head Injury Criterion (HIC) limit: 700 (15 ms maximum)
3. Chest acceleration limit: 60 g’s
4. Chest compression (deflection) limit: 63 mm (2.5 inches)
5. Femur loading (force) limit: 2250 pounds
6. Neck tension limit: 4170 N (937 pounds)
7. Neck compression: 4000 N (899 pounds)
8. Combined neck injury (Nij) limit: 1.0 (for any combination of tension-extension, tension-flexion, compression-extension or compression-flexion)

Question #1: Do you focus on airbag defect cases?

While there is no shortage of lawyers who accept any kind of accident and injury case, there are few whose primary focus is airbag defects. Ask the lawyer how many airbag defect cases he’s investigated and filed. Also, request a list of representative airbag cases and ask which ones involve issues similar to your case.

Question #2: Do you have direct experience in the automotive industry?

The answer to this question is a big factor in separating the lawyers who represent airbag defect victims and those who take cases without having any real industry knowledge. A lawyer with automotive industry experience will know …

• How the decisions are made on what design is used
• What testing and analysis is usually conducted on their products
• Who are the key personnel conducting the research and analysis
• What documents should have been generated during the design and development process
• What documents will be most helpful for your case
• How internal investigations are handled

Question #3: Do you have an engineering background?

The technical nature of airbag defect cases requires lawyers to understand input from engineering experts in subjects such as accident reconstruction, design analysis, testing and biomechanics. Those who understand engineering can ask intelligent questions about the strengths and weaknesses of your case. Better yet is an attorney who has had “hands-on” responsibility for airbag engineering, and who has been dealing with airbags for many years. Questions from an attorney with a background in airbags will also give you the best possible chance of proving your case.

Question #4: Will you work on my airbag defect case, or will you delegate the work to junior lawyers and associates?

Why should your case serve as a training ground for an inexperienced junior lawyer or paralegal? Due to the reasons stated above, you need an experienced airbag lawyer handling your case.

Question #5: Will you be available when I need you?

Whether it’s normal business hours or not, you want your questions and concerns addressed immediately. So hire an airbag lawyer who is available during evenings and weekends – and willing to meet at a time and place that is convenient for you.

Also, don’t hesitate to request your lawyer’s cell phone number. An attorney who truly accommodates you will give you the number without hesitation.

Question #6: How much does it cost to hire you?

An airbag defect attorney should never make you pay an up-front fee just to consult with you. In addition, you should never pay attorney fees or any investigation costs until compensation is recovered for your injuries.

Also, be careful with attorneys who “nickel and dime” you for typical office expenses such as ordinary mail, copies, telephone or fax charges.

Question #7 (Ask yourself this final question.): Do you trust the lawyer?

Rely on your instincts. If you can’t trust the lawyer, don’t hire him.

3 Questions to Ask Before Determining if an Airbag Caused Injury or Wrongful Death

Although airbags are intended as a safety device, government documentation confirms they have caused significant trauma during vehicle accidents and are responsible for hundreds of wrongful deaths.

This shouldn’t come as a major surprise, given airbags deploy at speeds sometimes exceeding 200 mph. After experiencing an airbag deployment, many consumers say the airbag appeared to explode and compare the sound to a shotgun blast.

When questioning an airbag’s performance during a vehicle accident, you should analyze 3 critical questions before determining its role in contributing to serious injuries or wrongful death.

Question #1: Should the airbag have deployed?

Deployment depends on many factors, including your type of airbag. If it did not deploy and should have, you may have a “failure to deploy” or “non-deployment” case. In such a situation, the airbag would have deployed if the airbag crash sensor or other components had not failed.

One reason for deployment failure is a crash sensor malfunction due to faulty wiring that connects the crash sensor to the electronic control unit. Sometimes airbags don’t deploy because the car company did not conduct adequate crash tests when designing the airbag crash sensor.

In fact, many airbag systems sold to consumers were never tested in car-to-car crash tests, even though such crashes occur every day.

If the passenger airbag deployed, but the driver airbag did not deploy, the vehicle may contain a defective “clockspring” or coil. This electrical device installed in the steering column beneath the driver airbag transmits an electrical current to deploy the driver airbag. Reasons for a malfunction include design defects, inadequate testing, improper installation and improper adjustment.

In some cases, a passenger airbag will not deploy even though the driver airbag deployed and a passenger was sitting in the seat. This often occurs when a passenger presence detection sensor doesn’t work properly.

If the airbag deployed, but should not have deployed, you may have an “inadvertent” or unwarranted low-speed deployment. These can occur because of airbag sensor or other electrical defects.

Unfortunately, some manufacturers used inappropriate sensor combinations that are overly susceptible to low-speed, localized impacts, such as a vehicle striking a pothole or curb. Other sensor systems fail to detect crashes into a pole or tree. This may be the result of not having enough crash sensors due to excessive cost-cutting at the car companies.

Question #2: Did the airbag deploy late?

When an airbag opens late, impact occurs at a closer range. The extreme force can cause catastrophic injuries, even though late deployments often occur in minor accidents.

Late deployments can often be prevented using additional sensors and/or changes to the algorithms of electronic sensors. In some cases, the vehicle’s “black box” can confirm a late deployment took place.

Question #3: Did the airbag have specific crash safety features?

Crash safety features are added to airbags to reduce the risk of injury during deployment. These include items such as airbag inflators that inflate less forcefully, tethers that significantly reduce “bag slap” injuries, and vents that decrease pressure inside the airbag.

An investigation into these features is necessary to determine if manufacturing defects and quality control problems caused or contributed to your injuries.

In addition to crash safety features, the airbag system must also work together with the other parts of the car. For example, airbag crash sensors depend on the vehicle having a good structure or frame so the signal is received soon enough to avoid a late deployment.

Also, the instrument panel (I/P) or “dash” needs to be designed so that the knees and legs are not injured, while keeping the body properly positioned. And, when the airbag deploys, it must not create additional hazards for other components. For example, some passenger airbags are known to shatter the dash and send the pieces flying toward the passenger at high speeds.

You should get answers to these questions for any potentially defective front, side, curtain or rollover airbags. You deserve a safe and effective airbag during any type of a crash.